Kuroda assures room for rate cuts

In a speech titled, “Comprehensive Assessment of the Monetary Easing: Concept and Approaches, Bank of Japan (BoJ) governor Haruhiko Kuroda delivered strong wordings and stressed that the notions of central banks going out of tools or hitting policy limits are far from being correct. However he laid out that there are no free lunches even for monetary policies and there are certain costs associated to the policies. Below are the key highlights,

• Mr. Kuroda stressed that reaching the 2 percent inflation goal at the earliest time possible remains the top priority of the Bank of Japan (BoJ).
• He said that no central bank is out of tools but when large scale easing continues there are costs to additional easing and it’s cost and benefits rather than limits. According to him, the Japanese economy has lot to gain if the inflation target is achieved.
• He stressed that rather than limits, there are certain areas of monetary policy that would be beyond the legal boundaries or shouldn’t be done such as underwriting government bonds or monetizing fiscal deficits. That means ‘Helicopter money’ is out.
• He said, as of now, there are scopes of pushing rates further into the negative and increase the size of the asset purchases.

The yen is currently trading at 103.5 per dollar.